Fathers of Men

by E. W. Hornung

“Evidently you won’t be sorry, so I shan’t waste any sympathy upon you. But I must say I think you might have thought of the house!”

The matter had not presented itself in that light to Jan; now that it did, he felt with Heriot on the spot, and did not perceive an unworthy although most human element in the man’s outlook. The house would not be ruined for life. On the other hand, in his determination to put a stiff lip on every phase of his downfall, and beyond all things not to betray himself by ever breaking down, Jan had over-acted like most unskilled histrions, and had already created an impression of coarse bravado on a mind prepared to stretch any possible point in his favour.

But it was no time to think about the accomplished interview with Bob Heriot, with truly terrific retribution even now awaiting him at the hands of the redoubtable old Jerry. About a hundred yards of the soft summer night, and he would stand in that awful presence for the last time. And it was all very well for Jan to call him “old Jerry” in his heart up to the last, and to ask himself what there was, after all, to fear so acutely from a man of nearly seventy who could not eat him; his heart quaked none the less, and if he had been obliged to answer himself it would have been with a trembling lip.

He dared to dawdle on the way, rehearsing his scanty past relations with the great little old man. There was the time when he was nearly flogged, after the Abinger affair. Well, the old man might have been far more severe than he really was on that occasion. There was that other early scene when Jan was told that another time he would not sit down so comfortably, and Chips’s story about his friend Olympus. It was all grim humour that appealed to this delinquent; but it was a humour that became terrible when the whole school were arraigned and held responsible for some individual vileness, pronounced inconceivable in a really sound community; for then they were all dogs and curs together, and, that demonstrated, it was “Dogs, go to your kennels!” And go they would, feeling beaten mongrels every one; never laughing at the odd old man, never even reviling him; often loving but always fearing him.

Jan feared him now the more because of late especially he had been learning to love Mr. Thrale. Though still only in the Lower Sixth, as Captain of Cricket he had come in for sundry ex officio honours, in the shape of invitations to breakfast and audiences formal and informal. On all such occasions Jan had been embarrassed and yet braced, puzzled by parables but enlightened in flashes, stimulated in soul and sinew but awed from skin to core; and now the awe was undiluted, crude, and overwhelming. He felt that every word from that trenchant tongue would leave a scar for life, and the scorn in those old eyes haunt him to his grave.

Sub-consciously he was still thinking of the judge and executioner in his gown of office, on his carved judgment seat, as the day’s crop of petty offenders found and faced him after twelve. In his library Jan had seldom before set foot, never with the seeing eye that he brought to-night; and the smallness and simplicity of it struck him through all his tremors when the servant had shown him in. It was not so very much larger than the large studies at Heriot’s. Only a gangway of floor surrounded a great desk in a litter after Jan’s own heart; garden smells came through an open lattice, and with them a maze of midges to dance round the one lamp set amid the litter; and in the light of that lamp, a pale face framed in silvery hair, wide eyes filled with heart-broken disgust, and a mouth that might have been closed for ever.

At last it came to mobile life, and Jan heard in strangely dispassionate tones a brief recital of all that had been heard and seen of his proceedings in the fatal hour when pretended illness kept him from the match. Again he was asked if he had anything to challenge or to add; for it was Heriot’s question in other words, and Jan had no new answer; but this time he could only shake a bowed head humbly, as he had bent it in acknowledgment of his own writing on the envelope. Jerry was far less fierce than he had expected, but a hundredfold more terrible in his pale grief and scorn. Jan felt an even sorrier and meaner figure than on coming up for judgment after the Abinger affair; so far from the support of secret heroics, it was impossible to stand in the white light of that nobly reproachful countenance, and even to remember that he was not altogether the vile thing he seemed.

“If there is one form of treachery worse than another,” said Mr. Thrale, “it is treachery in high places. The office that you have occupied, Rutter, is rightly or wrongly a high one in this school; but you have dragged it in the dust, and our honour stands above our cricket. On the eve of our school matches, when we had a right to look to you to keep our flag flying, you have betrayed your trust and forfeited your post and your existence here; but if it were the end of cricket in this school, I would not keep you another day.”

Jan looked up suddenly.

“Am I to go on a Sunday, sir?”